Wesleyan University Press, 2005, $29.95
reviewed in Interzone 199, August 2005
Science fiction is not one simple, unified form. It is actually made up of a myriad of strands of themes and ideas and approaches that interweave with each other in a potentially infinite number of combinations. We recognise the more substantial themes that go into the mix – utopias, aliens, space travel and the like – but some can be all too easily forgotten even though they have generated a considerable body of work. One such is the subject of this curious book.
In ancient times the dead journeyed underground to their afterlife in Hades, and this was an idea the Christian church adopted in its notion of Hell. The most famous literary representation of Hell is Dante’s Inferno which takes its narrator through successive rings of Hell, each deeper than the last. This pit of damnation has had such a strong grip on the European imagination that it is impossible to avoid finding echoes of it in H.G. Wells’s Morlocks, in the fascist realm of Joseph O’Neill’s Land Under England, in the post-nuclear torments of Harlan Ellison’s ‘I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream’, and on and on and on in the representations of the dark and buried worlds of more science fiction than we might casually imagine. And yet neither Dante nor the afterlife feature in this critical survey of the theme.
For Fitting, subterranean realms enter science fiction through a seventeenth century scientific notion propounded most notably by Edmund Halley. Seeking to explain some observed perturbations in the Earth’s magnetic field, Halley proposed that there was another world nested within our own. It wasn’t much of a theory and it was pretty soon discredited, except for an American nutcase called John Cleves Symmes who, in the early years of the nineteenth century, petitioned the American government and just about every scientific body in the world to fund an expedition that would prove there was a great hole at the poles, a hole that would prove the entrance to not one but seven inner worlds. From this, Fitting draws together a series of works from the early 18th century to the early 20th century which are based on the idea of this inner world. Each chapter of this book consists of a critical introduction followed by a number of extracts from the work in question. Some of these extracts are a page or two long, most are little more than a paragraph. These extracts illuminate some key idea, usually the journey to the inner world, the peoples found there, and sometimes the journey back. On more than one occasion Fitting quotes a sentence or two in his critical introduction, a footnote a longer passage to provide context, and then when we turn to the extracts we find the same passage yet again; a measure not of carelessness, I suspect, but of a sort of over-careful pedantry which should have been sorted out by the attention to detail one would normally expect of a university press.
Ranging from the anonymous Relation d’un voyage du Pôle Arctique au Pôle Antarctique of 1721 to At the Earth’s Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1914), there are stories of realms on the underside of our Earth’s crust (like a sort of subterranean Orbitsville) or on interior globes; there are voyagers who travel through the gateway at the poles or through volcanoes; there are utopias and comic dystopias and simple adventure stories (and Symzonia, attributed to John Seaborn (1820), seems to have been a fictional attempt to justify the mad theories of John Cleves Symmes). There are novels that are still in print (the Burroughs, Jules Verne’s Voyage au centre de la terre (1864), Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym’ (1838)) and to be honest what is said here doesn’t add much to our understanding or appreciation of them. There are others which have played an important part in the history of the genre but are less well known today (The Journey of Niels Klim by Ludvig Holberg (1741), Robert Paltock’s The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1750), The Coming Race by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1871)), and here Fitting makes a much more valuable contribution to our understanding. And there are works which have been deservedly forgotten – Casanova thought that if he was to be remembered, it would be for The Icosameron (1788), the extracts here demonstrate why he was mistaken. But there are curiosities here, too: stories which Fitting admits don’t belong here and which are included simply because they were classified as subterranean in Charles-Georges-Thomas Garnier’s 36-volume Voyages imaginaries of 1787-9, one must wonder why he did not omit them in favour of more relevant works. Poe’s story ends when the traveller reaches the entrance to the underworld, and so in context is interesting mostly for the works that have spun off from it, by Steve Utley and Howard Waldrop, and by Rudy Rucker, though these fall outside Fitting’s timescale and are not discussed. And there is no mention at all for the most famous of all underground adventures, Alice in Wonderland, which would have at least provided an interesting contrast to the rest of this collection.
For anyone interested in the early history of the genre, this is an invaluable collection. You will find insights here into works that are probably not even mentioned in most conventional histories of science fiction. But it is a frustrating collection nonetheless, leaving one convinced that it could have been a great deal more.